A band with devoted fans in both punk and heavy metal circles should have been untouchable. Yet the British group Motörhead walked into the studio for their third album with songs nobody had heard live and a producer who kept vanishing. The record that came out of that chaos, Bomber, landed on Bronze Records in 1979.
The timing was strange. Motörhead's previous album, Overkill, had broken them wide open earlier in 1979, with its title track reaching the UK top 40. A summer appearance on Top of the Pops had put the trio in front of the nation. Instead of riding that momentum carefully, they went straight back in with producer Jimmy Miller, the man behind some of the Rolling Stones' most famous work from 1968 to 1973.
Miller's vanishing act
Miller was not the same producer by then. Drummer Phil Taylor remembered him turning up half a day late or more. Once he disappeared from the studio entirely and was found asleep behind the wheel of a car. His heroin addiction was deepening, and it bled into the sessions at Roundhouse Recording Studios in London. The band had never played these songs on stage before recording them, and frontman Lemmy later regretted that. Additional recording took place at Olympic Studios. During the sessions, the band also played the Reading Festival, sharing the bill with The Police and The Tourists.
Once he disappeared from the studio entirely and was found asleep behind the wheel of a car.
The songs themselves were sharper and angrier than before. Dead Men Tell No Tales became the group's first anti-heroin track, written as their producer's heroin addiction deepened. Lawman went after the police, Talking Head took aim at television, and All the Aces criticised show business. The title track Bomber drew on Len Deighton's novel Bomber. Poison dealt with harsh family relationships, with Lemmy singing about marriage and a father leaving home. Step Down gave guitarist Eddie Clarke a rare lead vocal, after he complained about a lack of attention.
The Heinkel 111 cover
The cover matched the record's aggression. For the first time, a Motörhead album showed the band's photograph, with all three members shown inside the aircraft, seated in the cabins of a Heinkel 111 bomber. Artist Adrian Chesterman suggested the German plane, and Lemmy insisted on it, saying the bad guys make better things. Chesterman built a model of the Heinkel 111, painted it black for the lighting, and worked in black and white airbrush with later toning.
The gamble paid off commercially. Bomber reached number 12 on the UK Albums Chart, the band's best showing to that point. The single Bomber entered the UK singles chart on December 1, 1979, with a first pressing of 20,000 copies on blue vinyl. It sold out fast and was replaced with black. The album itself also appeared on blue vinyl at first.
A 40-foot bomber rig
For the tour, the band went even bigger. They built a 40-foot aluminium bomber lighting rig that moved forward and back and side to side, the first moving lighting structure of its kind. It had four engines, while the plane on the cover had two. Lemmy called Bomber a transitional album and admitted it had weak songs, naming Talking Head as one of them.
Reviewers were split. AllMusic's Jason Birchmeier called Bomber top-tier Motörhead, while a Rolling Stone critic described it as the slower, dirtier sister of Overkill. In 2005, a special two-disc reissue appeared for the band's 30th anniversary tour, and the album placed 397th in Rock Hard's book of the 500 greatest rock and metal albums of all time.
The record has now been out for 47 years, and it still sounds like a band refusing to slow down even as everything around them threatened to collapse. Bomber remains the moment Motörhead proved their breakthrough was not a fluke. They made it through a producer's addiction, untested songs, and a studio that kept losing its captain — and came out with their best chart result yet.